Cheap Star Trek - Deep Space Nine, Episodes 1 & 2: The Emissary (Pilot) (Video) (Rene Auberjonois) (Rene Auberjonois, Michael Dorn, Alexander Siddig, Corey Allen, Reza Badiyi, Gabrielle Beaumont, LeVar Burton, David Carson, Chip Chalmers) Price

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Customer Reviews of Star Trek - Deep Space Nine, Episodes 1 & 2: The Emissary (Pilot)

The problems that face Star Trek pilots are usually the same ones that crop up every five years or so (whenever Paramount decides to launch another moneymaker). "We need to introduce the characters," I imagine the suits saying, "We need to introduce the setting; we need to introduce the political undertones; we'd like to give the major characters a backstory; we'd like to drop some hints about storylines that we'll be following up on in the future; we'll need to populate the immediate area with some convincing bad guys; we'll want to explore the religious aspects of the indigenous people; we'll want to introduce some amazingly advanced alien creatures that humans are encountering for the first time; and we'll want an extended cameo from a star of the previous series. Oh, and yeah, we'll want some kind of a story in there too, okay?"

For everything that it's trying to do, I think EMISSARY mostly succeeds. The story itself is relatively simple, and revolves around introducing Ben Sisko (and the audience) to his new setting, his new command, and the various plot strands that will be cropping up in the future. The introduction of the characters is mostly handled well, although there are a few clumsy moments, and a lot of the people and their makeup don't appear to be quite in their regular form yet. I like the fact that the episode neatly subverts itself. The set up begins with this station being the backwater of the universe (influencing the decisions of more than one character), but by the end this has been completely reversed.

The pilot also contains a few examples of the sort of thing that I really dislike about Star Trek Series That Do Not Star William Shatner. I am talking about, of course, the reliance on technobabble and the ability of the crew to come up with miraculous solutions to problems in no time at all. Fortunately, there aren't too many examples of this on display here. Unfortunately, the two that spring to mind are particularly poor. The first is that Dax is able to totally redesign the way the laws of physics work, and throws out this observation as if she's giving advice about which wine goes with a particular kind of fish. In order to make the station's thrusters move the ship faster, she figures a way of lowering the mass of the object, therefore requiring less energy to push it. The question that immediately comes to mind is: if lowering the mass of something is so easy, why on Earth isn't this standard operating procedure for all forms of transportation? Do Starfleet care as little for fuel efficiency standards as the U.S. government does?

The other piece of "instant brilliance" is the fact that O'Brien manages to boost the power of the station's phasers with almost no effort on his part at all. Truly amazing. I can just imagine thousands of Federation scientists working around the clock, trying to think of a way to increase the efficiency of their government's phasers, only to be beaten to the punch by Miles O'Brien after two whole seconds of thought.

There are some nice touches that rescue this episode from being a plodding introduction that one must get through in order to understand the series. Sisko's discussion and explanations concerning "linear time" are quite interesting, although the first time I saw this, I thought that the story violated its own internal logic, and nothing that I saw on my second viewing convinced me that I was wrong (how could he teach the concept of linear time to beings that exist outside of it, when surely they would be stateless creatures and could only either already know of linear time, or could never know of linear time?). I liked the aliens living in the wormhole, even if they fall prey to many Star Trek stereotypes (alien beings that are so highly advanced that they act and talk like complete idiots). The characters only have one episode to establish themselves, but in that time I already find them much more interesting than the entirety of the Next Generation crew. The setting is again more intriguing than that of the previous series, and really makes the show feel that there is a lot of potential for conflict here. A rough start, but not a bad one.

The best pilot episode of all the Trek series
The powers that be pulled out all the stops for this excellent and very good-looking first show of the Deep Space Nine series. The infamous and often referred to battle at Wolf 359 is finally seen to some extended length in the beginning of 'Emissary'; the rundown space station is a well-conceived set design; the matte painting of the Bajoran temple on the planet surface is mesmerizing albeit too briefly seen; and all those aliens! The production design put forth here was the most superior effort by the creative staff in any Trek program to date - heck some of the movies don't look this great!

Also the story is a terrific, hard edged and dyed-in-the-wool science fiction tale that is handled well. The revelation of the existence of the wormhole; the incorporeal wormhole beings using a variety of people from Sisko's memories to interact with him; the explanation of the mysterious Orbs and their purpose; Sisko using the game of baseball to demonstrate the concept of linear time; his rush of emotions over his admittance of his inability to 'exist beyond the moment his wife died' and that he has been living in non-linear time; many more brilliant touches are present within this well-structured script.

The characters are surprisingly well defined for a first episode. Normally the main characters undergo a severe change in the shows immediately following; an actor will begin to add their personality to the composite of the person they are playing and these differences are usually noticeable. That doesn't happen on ST: DS9 though, the character flow from pilot to series inception is practically seamless. The best character interchange we get to see in 'Emissary' is the scene in Sisko's new office where he has called together Odo and Quark for a meeting. The tension between Odo and Quark comes into play right away; Quark breaks out in uproarious laughter at Sisko's request for him to remain at DS9 and become a community leader; Odo sarcastically makes the observation that Quark has all the natural qualities of a politician. The addition of the character of Dax allows the show to continue the familiar Trek theme of the differences between our Earth-centric view of everything in terms of humanity and the point of view from an outsider that adds interesting and conflicting complexities. Being over three hundred years old and having existed as a variety of alien beings added a great and very unique dimension to this Trek series. As far as the actors go for this particular show an honorable mention should be made for the young Cirroc Lofton; he stood in for the wormhole aliens in a variety of sequences and did an admirable job. Also his scenes with Avery Brooks as father and son are believable and convincing.

Best line: Sisko and Gul Dukat's first meeting is quite memorable. When Gul Dukat makes a point of how uncomfortably close the Federation members are to the formidable Cardassians Sisko remarks sarcastically "We'll be sure and keep the dog off the lawn."

Sisko discovers a wormhole and that his life is not linear
The two-hour pilot of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" starts with a flashback to the Federation's battle with the Borg as Wolf 359, when Jean-Luc Picard was Locutus. The Borg destroy the USS Saratoga, killing the wife of Commander Benjamin Sisko, who escapes with his son, Jake. It is now three years later and Sisko is placed in command of Deep Space Nine, a space station built by the Cardassians around the planet Bajor. The occupation over, Sisko is charged with helping Bajor prepare for membership in the Federation. But the planet is on the brink of civil war and Kai Opaka, the spiritual leader of Bajor, declares Sisko to be "the emissary." The Cardassians have stolen eight of the nine crystal orbs that can lead to the Celestial Temple, where dwell the Prophets, the deities of Bajor. Sisko and his science officer, the Trill Jadzia Dax, discover a wormhole and Sisko encounters the Prophets, who turn out to be non-corporeal aliens who live there. Then things get really interesting.

Now that DS9 is long gone, I think we are in a much better position to evaluate the pilot episode, especially in terms of how the series was able to develop and expand upon the various premises established here at the start. Sisko as the Emissary and his love of baseball, the wormhole and Bajor's religion, the Cardassian occupation and their continuing involvement in the quadrant, Dax and the Trills, Odo and the Founders, Quark and the Ferengi, are all still important at the end of the series, which would seem to speak to how successful DS9's creators were in establishing the series. So if you have asked me way back when what I thought about these first two episodes I would have rated them a 4; but in retrospect I have to bump it up one more star. Of course, there are so many characters and so much exposition being established that there are lots of gaps to be filled in later--and Sisko does lay it a bit heavy on poor Picard--but that is why DS9 is best considered as a series and not some sort of episodic sitcom.